Antibiotic resistance was around long before we started using antibiotics with a frequency and enthusiasm that borders on addiction. The same genes that modern bacteria are currently loading up on to protect themselves against antibiotics have been found in ancient bacteria frozen in Arctic permafrost for over 30,000 years.

These genes – which would have imbued those ancient bacteria with resistance to some of our top-line antibiotics – didn’t confer much of an advantage when our ancestors were busy trying to pick woolly mammoth out of their teeth.

But since we started slinging antibiotics at every real or imagined pathogenic threat, we created the perfect conditions to make resistance genes the hottest accessory for every bacterium around.

Even the godfather of antibiotics Sir Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin, warned of the risk of spreading resistance back in 1946, arguing the public demand would mean that drugs were over-used until the bacteria evolved better defences. “The thoughtless person playing with penicillin treatment is morally responsible for the death of the man who finally succumbs to infection with the penicillin-resistant organism,” he told readers of the New York Times. “I hope the evil can be averted.”

The antibiotic crisis is one of the topics that will be discussed at the BBC Future’s World Changing Ideas Summit in Sydney in November.

HOW BAD IS IT REALLY?

Remember tuberculosis? You probably don’t, because for most of us our closest encounter with this awful infection has been watching Nicole Kidman’s character Satine elegantly expire from it in the movie Moulin Rouge.

Thanks to the antibiotics isoniazid and rifampicin,Mycobacterium tuberculosis has been largely banished from wealthy western society (although it never quite went away from the rest of the world).

But now it’s back, and it’s worse than ever. We are seeing an alarming increase in cases of tuberculosis resistant to both isoniazid and rifampicin, emerging in parts of the world such as Papua New Guinea, India, China and Russia.

Multi-drug resistant tuberculosis has been nicknamed ‘Ebola with wings’. It’s easily transmitted through a cough or a sneeze, and your chances of surviving it – even with the best medical care – are around 50%.

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